Brown's Daily Word 5-30-12

Blessed be the Name of our Lord, who surrounds us with so much love and grace in all seasons. Praise the Lord for various seasons that we celebrate in the life of the church. The Lord has given us various festivals so that we can celebrate and recount all His promises and His blessings. Last Sunday was the "Day of Pentecost" in the life of the Church. The Lord sent the Holy Spiri,t as He had promised, to His disciples. The Holy Spirit came upon the disciples with a mighty wind and with fire. It was both audible and visible. As the disciples began to declare about the mighty deeds of the Lord Almighty, the people gathered from various parts of the world with diverse languages heard the proclamation in their own languages and understood the message.

We will meet at 6:00 PM today, for our Mid-week gathering for food and fellowship, and Bible Study. We will be looking at Acts 2.

We read about Babel in Genesis 11, how the Lord confused the people. The proud and the arrogant got confused. They could no longer understand each other. We read about the Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples in Acts 2. Pentecost reverses Babel. When the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, who were then dispirited and discouraged, they became bold and courageous. They became galvanized and unafraid. Their lives were turned upside down and right side up.

One of the most dramatic examples of this is the life of William J. Murray, the son of Madeline Murray O’Hare, the famous atheist who was responsible for the Supreme Court ruling which removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools in the United States. He tells in his book, My Life Without God, about living in a home where there was constant rage and violence. His mother could not keep a job because of her frequent angry outbursts. She never married either man who fathered her children, and lived with her parents and brother in a small row house in Baltimore. Murray’s grandmother read Tarot cards, his grandfather was engaged in illegal activities, and his uncle kept stacks of pornography in his room. William Murray was told by his famous mother that since there was no God, nothing was really right or wrong. She taught him that the most important things in life were food, drink and sex, and he took her advice and fully indulged himself. This began to change in 1980, when he sought help for his drinking problem through a Twelve Step program. It was his first encounter with anyone who talked about a loving God. Yet this loving God had no name. He read a novel that told the story of Luke in the New Testament. It talked about Luke’s relationship with God and finding God’s love. There began to be a stirring and yearning in his heart for that kind of experience, but he had no idea how to come into contact with this God. Then one evening, on January 25, 1980, as he was sleeping in his apartment in San Francisco, he says that the Holy Spirit came upon him and told him to seek the truth in the Bible. That was the one place he had never looked before, for that was the very book his mother had removed from our nation’s schools by her lawsuit in 1963. Murray states that the true reason for his mother filing the suit was her deep personal hatred for followers of Christianity. He told how his mother’s zeal against Christianity was so great that it had “taken over her life and rendered her incapable of seeing other people (himself included) as anything but either enemies or people who agreed with her every ideal.” Murray committed his life to Christ and has never looked back. O’Hair called her son a traitor and cut off all communication with him. O'Hair died few years ago penniless, and homeless and died in utter obscurity ... Murray experienced the love of God he was longing for and now goes all over the world telling his story. He was the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C. Pentecost reversed the Babel in his life.
That is the purpose of Pentecost. Pentecost gives new purpose. It changes chaos and confusion into understanding. It turns us from rebellion to love and obedience through the power of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost turns despair into hope and brings a new love into our hearts that wants to reach out to God and others.

In Christ,

Brown

http://youtu.be/i2Iz4cS1PF8